A blog which charts our journey through the adoption process. The ups and downs, the process and the pondering, the self-exploration and the anticipation.
Hopefully these jottings will be a reassurance, and perhaps be a little enlightening, to others considering this particular journey or making their way through it themselves.

Monday, 29 July 2013

Memories...

It was a week or so after our first
meeting with Denise, the Earl Grey was brewing nicely in the pot and
some Duchy Originals were arranged on a plate saying, “Eat me, eat
me...”. We were ready to resume trawling through our pasts for
Denise’s benefit.

It’s strange dredging through past
memories and mining them for significance. It’s not something which
we generally do. We certainly don’t do it in chronological order.
One of the exercises which we had done on our Prep Days was to think
through the key developmental moments from our personal histories and
chart them on a time-line. Alongside each event we had to indicate
whether it was an “Up” arrow or a “Down” arrow. Looking back
over what I consider to be a broadly happy childhood it was
fascinating to see how many arrows were pointing downwards rather
than upwards. It seemed that happiness and contentment were a
continuum which was punctuated by traumas of different types. I
suppose I should be glad that it wasn’t the other way around!

Monday, 22 July 2013

Bumps in the road

It was only a week or so later (a
completely interminable and dragging week or so later) that we
received a letter informing us that “Denise”, our social worker
would phone us soon to arrange a mutually convenient date for our
first home study visit. We didn’t have long to wait as just the
next day the mobile rang while my wife was at work. However, it
wasn’t quite the call we were expecting. There was a tetchy voice
on the other end of the phone. The tone would have been completely
passive aggressive except that there was no passivity about it. “I’ve
been looking at your referee list and it’s just completely
unacceptable. Didn’t you even read the guidance?”

Yes, of course we had and, indeed, we’d
got clarification from Maureen and Doreen at the Prep Days, including
asking them to tell us if the mix of people that we’d put down
seemed reasonable. We’d even checked whether it was OK to include
James and Emma, our closest friends, who had just moved to Brussels.
They were on the end of the phone and would be popping back regularly
to see family – so that was fine, we were told.

“You’ve got too many family
members. You can’t have more than two. You’ll need to drop one of
them. And one of these referees lives in Belgium. You can’t expect
the council to send people overseas to visit people. What were you
thinking? Didn’t you read the guidance? You’ll have to give me
alternative referees right now.”

Tuesday, 16 July 2013

Moving on...

I must confess that the fourth
Preparation Day is, ironically, the one of which I have the least
vivid memories. Perhaps it was the fact that most of the day was
taken up with what seemed like really dry information about the
administrative and legal process. There were some more brief
discussions around how to apply the PACE principles in practice but
most of it was process.

What happened when, who had legal
responsibility for what, what steps would be taken by whom to cross
which hurdle... I’ve spent a good proportion of my working life in
the public sector so I’m no stranger to the importance of
bureaucracy. But even for me the content was dry, opaque and distant.
Goodness knows how those with a lower red-tape tolerance threshold
were coping.

But that was still to come. To
celebrate the last of the Prep Days we were early. Stupidly early.
All of the regular snarl ups and bottle necks that we left plenty of
time to negotiate had been flowing like quicksilver. Jane and John
had seemingly had a similarly blessed journey as they were already
sitting in the meeting room when we arrived.

Tuesday, 9 July 2013

An aside...

This
weekan article in the Guardian by Fraser McAlpine has been causing
something of a stir in the adoption blogosphere. From my own reading
of the article it seems to be a grossly misinformed, poorly argued
and shoddy piece of journalism. Which is a shame because, ironically,
I happen to agree with the main premise which Mr McAlpine is slowly
edging towards.

Names
are important. Identity is important. You meddle with it at your
peril and only with very good reason.

The
article concludes... “Can't we just give the children new names?

“Unless there's an issue of
security, in which case identity takes second place to personal
safety, the answer to that question should most often be no. And the
reason is simple: an adopted child should never grow up ashamed of
where they came from. Otherwise there's a risk that they will develop
void people of their own, and that's a competition all parents can
well do without.”

Hear
hear, well said that man. Unfortunately in getting to that conclusion
Mr McAlpine manages to misrepresent both adoptive parents and the
adoption preparation process. And insult adopters and social workers
into the process. This is from someone who, apparently, is a member
of an Adoption Panel. For the uninitiated, the Adoption Panel is the
semi independent body within an adoption agency or local authority
which takes decisions on who should and should not be approved to
join the the adoption register and what adoption placements should
and should not be approved.

Hey there, wait a minute Mr Postman

In the afternoon session on the third
Prep Day we started to broach the thorny subject of “contact”.
The group seemed to go into the discussions rather polarised in their
attitudes. For us, the idea of an open adoption had been liberating
when it was first mentioned at the Open Evening and Orientation Day.
Rather that sort of honesty rather than having a deep, dark, dirty
secret hanging over the family. The sort of thing that Auntie Agatha
would let slip over Christmas dinner during the teenage years. Light
blue touch paper... Was it something that we were actively looking
forward to? No. Of course there would be baggage which went with that
and we’d just have to deal with those downs if we were to enjoy the
upside.

For others they clearly hadn’t
reached that point. They were still openly horrified at the idea of
spending time and energy on the evil birth parents for time
immemorial. After all, they were sufficiently bad people that they
had their child taken away in the first place... And what about all
those neglect and abuse horror stories? We shouldn’t be worrying
about how they felt. Did I mention before that our group was a little
feisty and had some strong opinions they weren’t afraid to voice?

So there was clearly an uphill struggle
for Maureen and Doreen to get the rest of the group at least partly
onside.

Tuesday, 2 July 2013

The third Preparation Day, we were
told, was going to focus on the actual process of adoption itself;
how we would be assessed through the coming months, adoption panel,
how children were selected for particular prospective adopters,
introductions and settling in, ongoing contact with the birth
parents. So not too much to cover in two three hour sessions. By now the group was beginning to be a
group of friends who we were looking forward to meeting again. It was
clear that there were some with whom we had begun to click more than
others (and some whose façade we couldn’t seem to break through
and not for want of trying). But, that’s the same in any random
group of people who are brought together by mutual interest of
circumstance – whether at work or in a club. And still there was a
little feeling of “us against the system” to bind our group
together.